My favourite Anglosphere politician

In a press conference on Saturday, Kevin Rudd, who has resigned as foreign minister to challenge his boss, Julia Gillard, said something revealing. 'The job of the Australian government', he pronounced, 'is to keep Tony Abbott out'.

Really? That's the primary purpose of the state machine of the Commonwealth of Australia? Not to run the country? Thanks for clearing that one up, Kevin.

It's hardly surprising that the Australian Labor Party is unpopular when it treats voters this way. The party's present convulsions betray a contempt for the electorate, a sense that the little people will put up with whatever they're damn well given. No one is even pretending that the Rudd-Gillard vendetta is ideological. This is the first leadership campaign I can remember where not a single politician has used the words 'I want to focus on the issues'. Given the Corsican nature of what is going on, such a phrase would be risible. Instead, Labor pols fall back on that most desperate of appeals: 'Keep the other lot out'.

Tony Abbott is, at present, my favourite English-speaking politician (though Canada's Stephen Harper also has a pretty good claim). He is one of those fortunate men who is at once clever and likeable, a Rhodes Scholar who, when campaigning, speaks in monosyllables (at the 2010 election, which he lost by a single seat, he summarised his programme as 'stop the [refugee] boats, end big new taxes, stop waste, pay off debt'). For some Lefties, a brilliant man with demotic appeal is a class traitor; their sense of betrayal is compounded by the fact that Abbott is a Roman Catholic who inexcusably refuses to be either Labor or republican. To top it off, the Liberal leader is guilty of what are, in the eyes of Australia's bien pensant elites, the three unpardonable heresies of our age: he believes in God, opposes eco-taxes and wants to scrap restrictions on free speech.

That such a man should be leading in the opinion polls, despite the prevalent MSM culture, says a great deal about his countrymen's level-headedness. The Australian electoral system might have been specifically designed to push politicians onto the centre ground. Compulsory voting means you don't have to bother about motivating your base, and the preferential votes system means you needn't worry about being outflanked by a more hardcore party. Yet Abbott has stuck, patiently and courteously, to his beliefs, winning the respect even of voters who don't share them.

One of those beliefs is an identification with the community of free English-speaking peoples, the Anglosphere. Even by conservative standards, Abbott is outstandingly pro-British and pro-American.

I find that the Australian debate about national identity tends to run in parallel to the British one. British Europhiles have their exact counterparts among those Australians who contend that the alliance with the United Kingdom is archaic, and that their country ought to embrace its future as an Asian power. Both groups are vocal in politics, academia and Leftist media. Neither has much support in the country at large. (You can hear me debating the issue with an amiable Leftie Melbourne radio presenter here.)

How I hope that Abbott wins. Partly because, like most Britons, I wish Australia well, and believe he will be a statesman of the first rank. Partly because his victory would annoy all the right people. Mainly, though, because his election would prove that courage, decency and integrity can have their reward in this life.